Biotechnology business Amgen Inc. (AMGN) saw the cost of its shares drop from a high of $77 to around $55 as of October 2, 2007. The decrease in Amgen supply adhered to news of minimized sales forecasts for its best-selling drug, Aranesp. With decreasing profits from medication sales, Amgen is being forced to cut expenditures. The business revealed it was laying off between 12 – 14% of its workforce and prepared to cut capital expenditures by $1.9 billion. See the relevant newspaper article is the resources box.health economics and outcomes research companies
Remarkably, Amgen intends no reduction in personnel in its Global Health Economics as well as Outcomes Research (HEOR) system. This device comprises a patchwork of professionals with Ph.D. s in business economics, pharmacologists, medical doctors, and also various analysts with information adjustment backgrounds. Their mission is to evaluate pre-clinical trial style and post-clinical trial information to remove some causal partnership between an Amgen medication as well as a positive benefit to clinical trial people. Generally, the competent clinical doctors managing a clinical test at field places can observe whether a medication is having any positive advantage for patients. These doctors are perfectly capable of examining the effectiveness of a medicine being examined in the scientific test.
The HEOR system is contacted us to activity to validate statistically what the physicians assert they observe in the field and also to look for added, unintended take advantage of the medication so that Amgen can request a license on the unplanned effect. Because of the multitude of clinical tests that do not expose efficacy of proposed drugs, the key work of Amgen’s HEOR device appears to be recovering any type of feasible value or usage for an Amgen drug declined by the clinical neighborhood.
There is a great line in between adjusting data to illustrate a deeply surprise benefit for people versus looking for an advantage where none exists. Depending on numerous analytical methods, Amgen’s HEOR team proposes causal connections as well as seriously seeks information to validate them. Only individuals with a certain way of thinking can be boosted by the everyday possibility of looking through garbage in hopes of finding a ruby.
From what the HEOR staff informed me, repeatedly the data control goes attempting to show the medicines turned down by the medical professionals in professional trials do in truth reveal some obscure, commonly insignificant, benefit to individuals. The Health Economics and also Outcomes Research team want to think it is smarter than the doctors in the field, due to the fact that the HEOR personnel case they can find clinical benefits that physicians treating patients fell short to observe. In my viewpoint, the Amgen HEOR team research study versions as well as their analytical outcomes are commonly rare, at best, and crazy, at worst. I instruct Healthcare Economics at both the undergraduate and also graduate level. Having seen just how my undergraduate students review health care policy campaigns and the pharmaceutical industry, I have no doubt they would easily tear apart the presumptions, analyses, as well as verdicts of the Amgen HEOR studies and records. Capitalists have to wonder why Amgen invests an approximated $25 million in incomes for its HEOR professionals if their output is prone to rebuke by undergraduate students without pharmaceutical training.Medical Communications Solutions
Another indication of the low quality of Amgen’s Health Economics unit is its absence of magazines. Amgen definitely takes pride when its personnel can get research results released in peer-reviewed journals. Specialist journal publications by Amgen staff aid the firm’s marketing projects, contribute to the eminence of the firm, as well as aid allow them to recruit leading scientists. On October 2, 2007, I looked the Nexis “All Full-Text Medical Journals” database making use of the key words “AMGEN” in the exact same sentence as “Health Economics” or “Outcomes Study.” A total amount of 0 articles were discovered. I after that duplicated this very same search utilizing the “All Medline Review Article References,” which has journal magazines pre-1975 to today. A grand total of one article appeared entitled “Mental end results associated with anemia-related tiredness in cancer cells patients,” which relates to Amgen’s now declining sales drug Aranesp. Hopeless to find some proof of tangible published study by Amgen’s HEOR unit, I after that browsed the data source called “Healthcare Archive News,” which has publicity statements and also press releases regarding even minor scientific as well as medical research study searchings for. The database contained absolutely no short articles concerning any type of Amgen HEOR clinical searchings for yet did checklist a few news release worrying the appointments of David Beier and also Joshua Ofman to lead Amgen’s HEOR group.